Design Lab

Catalogue / Plate 31← All plates

A colour kitchen with a recipe book

Bring dyes together, stir a measured screen mix and keep a swatch you can use again.

31 / Colour · SVG · product interaction

Sampleton Dyeworks

The colour kitchen / 01

A little of this.
A shade of you.

Bring dyes together. Stir them into something new. Keep the recipe for the colour you didn’t know you wanted.

01 / The mixing table3 drops · 1 group

Drag a drop. Keyboard: Tab to a dye, arrows to move, Enter to stir.

The dye shelf

Add one equal part. Up to eight drops.

Three one-part dyes are in the vat. Stir them, or pull one away.

Your swatch book

0/6 this visit

Keep a colour and it lands here. Load it back into the vat whenever you like.

Remake it

Build one interactive web page: Sampleton Dyeworks turns meeting colours into a workbench. Choose equal dye parts, draw them together, stir connected drops and pull them apart with their recipes intact. Preview the selected colour on woven cloth, name it, keep session swatches, load them again and download a recipe.

Set it on an invented business called Sampleton, with its own drawn or generated pictures and no one else's files. It suits: Exploratory colour tools, craft workshops and product customisers where visitors need to keep and revisit what they make. Do not let it fail the way this kind of piece usually does: A pleasing animation with no usable result, or a recipe that forgets what has already been mixed. Each drop carries a conserved ingredient recipe. The screen model is stated, all edits work by keyboard and optional drift stops for reduced motion.

It must work with the keyboard, on a phone, with reduced motion respected and no text under 12px. Tell me which libraries you chose and why.
Notes: when it suits, when it does not, how it fails
When it suits
Exploratory colour tools, craft workshops and product customisers where visitors need to keep and revisit what they make.
When it does not
Production dye formulation, colour matching or any claim about how physical pigments will behave.
How it fails
A pleasing animation with no usable result, or a recipe that forgets what has already been mixed. Each drop carries a conserved ingredient recipe. The screen model is stated, all edits work by keyboard and optional drift stops for reduced motion.

Made by Codex from Pete's brief for two new applications of colours that meet, for the invented Sampleton Dyeworks.